


I am the captain of my soul (but oh, this ship is sinking)

by KrasneTigritsa



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman and Robin (Comics)
Genre: 'Born to Kill' has murdered me, Angst, Bruce Wayne is a (canonically) Good Dad, Bruce Wayne is a Good Dad, Damian is a Smol Bean, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I guess that could be a trigger?, I just like adding emotions and subtext to canon things, I love him, So does Bruce, damian wayne angst, mentions of brain matter, sorta hurt/comforty, there are too many feelings, this is another scene rewrite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2019-01-21 22:46:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12467648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KrasneTigritsa/pseuds/KrasneTigritsa
Summary: Damian was raised to be strong as steel and just as sharp. His mother wanted a weapon, so that is what Damian became.But all Bruce wants is a son, and Damian's not sure how to be one.





	I am the captain of my soul (but oh, this ship is sinking)

**Author's Note:**

> title inspired by 'Invictus' by William Ernest Henley. It's a poem about being unbreakable, while Batman stories are somewhat consistently about being able to pick yourself up and heal,in spite of being broken. There's a very slight difference in philosophies there, but it's an important difference, and it seems to sum up a lot of Damian's struggles with being assimilated into the family, so. *shrugs*

For a brief and hopeful second, Damian knew that he could lie and say that Nobody (Morgan. Father insisted on calling him Morgan) had died by accident. It would have been painfully easy; a little acting, a simple ‘I was only trying to get him to sleep.’ Father would have believed him. 

But Damian knew it was not an accident. He made decisions, not mistakes; and he would stand by those decisions if it killed him. He was not a coward. 

Father’s voice was an echo in the upper reaches of the groaning, sinking wreck of the boat; the sizzle of spilt acid buzzed through the not-quite silence, and the twin scents of burning flesh and sloshing bilge did nothing to make the atmosphere more pleasant. 

Father was staring at him with wide eyes, and Damian wondered what he was seeing. Not a partner, clearly. Probably not a son, either. Judging from his current expression, he was seeing something more akin to rabid dog. 

Damian was too tired to be indignant. He looked blandly at his hand--the functioning one--and realized that he hadn’t taken it out of Nobody’s head yet. He could feel the strange texture of brain matter and the warmth of recently-dead meat through the protective cloth of his gloves, and thought with a strange double sense that Mother have been proud, and Father’s expression was not, perhaps, completely uncalled-for. 

“What...what have you _done?_ ” 

“What I had to do,” Damian says, and he still does not pull his fingers free. Nobody--Morgan--is limp and soggy and heavy, but Damian cannot stop staring at him. “What I needed to do. For you, Father.”

Father is still, a mass of Kevlar and muscle, smelling of blood and aftershave, speechless. Damian does not look at him. The man chained to the table--the man he killed--as long as he looks at _him,_ he will know that what he has done is right. Not a mistake. 

He does not make mistakes.

 

* * *

 

 

Father saves him, again, and it’s really no surprise that Damian hasn’t earned the man’s trust yet; he’s hardly proved himself worthy of it. Tonight was his last try at it, his last stretch for the prize, and he has fallen farther short than ever. He is perversely happy--for his own sake--that Father cares so much for human life. That care, surely, is what prompts his gentleness as he bundles Damian into the batmobile. That care will get him dropped off somewhere where they will make sure his bones heal properly. 

Father’s heart is his weakness, and if Damian loved him as he should he would wish that weakness gone, wish that Father was hard and cold and cruel and _strong._

But Damian has already given up his place in that heart in order to keep Father safe, and perhaps it is not so bad, not so great a failing, to be glad that at least he will not die because of it. 

(All is not lost; Grayson will help him. He knows it. The assurance is oddly warm in the pit of his belly). 

The least important thing, in all of this, is the dog; but somehow it’s the dog that Damian winds up talking about. 

“Titus.” 

He’s named the beast, as Father ordered, and it’s only right that the creature should keep his given name. This is probably Damian’s last chance at telling Father what it is. 

“What?”

“The dog,” Damian manages, trying to make himself heard over the hum of the engines. “I named him _Titus_.” 

The world is spinning softly around his head, now, in shades of red and black; and he barely hears, 

“You'll see him in a few minutes...” 

Before the red fades away entirely, and the light with it, and he hears nothing at all.

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes up to the smell of the manor--vaccuumed carpets and unused rooms and Alfred’s lemongrass-scented cleaners. The bed feels wrong, too soft, beneath his back; but the strange feeling is familiar now. The lingering muzziness of a sedative buzzed through his veins, but didn’t dim his senses enough to make him unaware of the open door of his room, the warm light of the hallways spilling into the familiar dark, or of the man that stands, hesitant, in the doorway. 

His heartbeat bucks a little, rebelling against his will, and he slows it down again, deliberately. He’s at the Manor, by some strange mischance, and he doesn’t want to wake up just yet. (it’s cowardice and he knows it, but he’s tired. Father is beyond caring, and Mother never has to know). 

It is hell to keep his heartbeat steady as Father’s footsteps--padding, soft in a way that belies his size--approach the bedside. 

A soft breath sounds above him (hesitant) and a hand takes his (warm). He can feel the roughness of old calluses and the smoothness of fresh bandages both on Father’s fingers as he slides something--something metal, but warm with having been held--into Damian’s hand.

Then the footsteps pad away again, leaving the room far colder and emptier and somehow more lemon-scented than it was before. 

He looks over the drive left in his hand, wonders if he dare listen to it yet. It could be anything. An evaluation of his progress, perhaps, a recap of the evening’s failures. Or...

It would be _like_ his father, to issue an eviction like this, to separate the action from himself as far as possible. He curls his fingers around the drive, looks around him at the overlarge room. Still a strange room, even after all this time; the wood paneling that is far too dark and ominous, the yawning fireplace, the meticulously cleaned, decades-old carpet. It is all very...western. Very _Father_. Damian has never fit in here, and never would, and it is not as though he will have nowhere to go, after. (Grayson will take him in, won’t he? No. He will. Damian will not doubt that). 

He wants to stay, all the same. Wants it more than he has ever wanted anything. In a way, _this_ is all he’s ever wanted--to be with Father, to be _like_ him. 

Ha. 

Damian grits his teeth and plugs the drive in, ready now to hear Father explain exactly how unlike they are.

 

* * *

 

 

Damian finds him an hour later, in a disused room far in the East wing of the manor. He’s taking great dust-laden sheets off the furniture, flapping them about in a way that Damian suspected Pennyworth would never approve of. If he didn’t know better, he’d say Father was puttering. 

“What are you doing?”

The painkillers have long since worn off, and Damian is aching. None of the pains are new. Broken bones and bruised muscles are child’s play to handle, and as for the strange ache in his chest--the suffocated sense of panic that comes from having every expectation thwarted--well, it grows more familiar every day. 

The pain exhausts him, though. Makes it hard to think. It always has, no matter how often his teachers forced him to push beyond it; and the persistent tiredness is almost as frustrating as the pain itself. 

“Finishing what I started.” Father replies, mildly, as though it’s not nearly six in the morning, as though they’ve spent all evening in the Manor and done nothing worth mentioning. It’s unsettling. 

“Which is?”

“Getting rid of the darkness. This is the only room I haven’t touched since my parent’s murder. It’s my father’s den. I think it finally deserves to see a little light, don’t you?” 

He doesn’t have a reply to that. 

“I listened to all of it,” he reports, finally. The message was...not what he’d expected. Not what he’d steeled himself for. 

And now Father is walking with a limp and there’s a bandage on his nose, and he’s telling Damian about his own father--his parents--with no steel in his voice at all, no guardedness, none of the usual shielding that accompanies their conversations. Damian is tired--so tired--and he does not feel quite able to put his own shields up, though he is afraid he will need them, tonight. 

“And?” 

“And you _wanted_ to kill Morgan after he shot you back in London.” 

Father stills, the great dust-sheet gathered in pale folds around his feet. Damian cannot make his voice as accusatory as he’d like it.

“And...for what he did to you,” Father adds, and turns away again, flopping the great dusty sheet into a great dusty armchair and beginning to muddle with the curtains. 

There is a truce in this shrouded room, it seems, and Damian settles into it uncertainly, leaning against the desk and letting his shoulders slump with the weight of his tiredness. If Father can show his weakness, then perhaps Damian can do the same. It feels strange, though, uncomfortable, allowing himself to relax, to slip before the one man in the world he wants to convince of his worth. Uncomfortable, but...right, like the itch of a healing bone. 

“I recorded those thoughts because I wanted you yo hear that you’re not alone, Damian--that you’re unfortunately as much my son as you are your mother’s.” 

At first all Damian hears is the word _unfortunate_ , and he cringes inside before he catches the gist of the statement. 

“Meaning?” he demands. 

“Meaning the apple didn’t only fall far from the Ducard tree, but from the Wayne tree as well. I fight back that uncontrollable rage more than you know,” 

Damian wonders if he should insist that Father’s rage cannot be uncontrollable if he does, in fact, control it; but there is something in the stillness of the room, the rawness in Father’s voice, the fact that after everything, his concern was for Damian, to let him know that he isn’t alone, that makes him reluctant to argue. 

So when Father starts philosophizing about not killing (no killing, no killing, Damian has heard it often enough now to make him sick. He does not _want_ to kill, but he does not see what else he can do. No match is truly over until the death-blow) he does not argue. He questions, but he does not argue. For a moment, that is enough to almost break the little truce of the room; Father becomes himself again, tall and towering as a stone statue, as the impossible standard from Mother’s stories, and Damian curls into himself further, shrinking into the desk and cursing himself for coming unguarded. He has no shields now, no energy to put any up, and Father can shred him to pieces with nothing but words, if he tries. 

Mother was simpler. Even when she was cruel, even when her teachings made him go numb inside and feel half-dead, he knew what she wanted--she wanted him to be strong, obedient. A trustworthy weapon, a sharp sword. 

Father--he is not sure what Father wants of him. _Follow orders, think for yourself, fight the rage, fight yourself, protect the castle, don’t kill--_

It is training, and for something that Damian wants (more than anything), but he seems to be failing every test.All Father tells him is what he is not supposed to be, and knowing what he should not be is--it is not enough. 

“I don’t _want_ to end up like Ducard,” he says. (the boy who was never enough, the boy who was beaten by an adopted son, the boy who was left behind and existed as _Nobody_ before he ceased to exist at all) (the man that all but begged Damian to kill him, if only to take him away from the pain of another failure). “Without a moral compass...I don’t want to turn into a _nobody_. I want to be like you.” 

He does not like this feeling of wide-openness, this weakness, this lack of control, but he cannot seem to close himself up again. Perhaps the painkillers have not worn off completely, after all. 

“I’ve always wanted to be like you,” he adds, without entirely meaning to, and he’s rambling now. The painkillers are still in his system somewhere, and he curses them to hell and back. “But sometimes I don’t know what I am, or even who I am.” that is a lie. He is a weapon taken from its wielder. His mother never wanted a _son_ , and his father never wanted a weapon, so now he is niether. He is...nothing. 

Nobody. 

The light is starting to drift into the room, turning the few remaining shrouds pink, calling unwanted attention to the dust and the disusedness, and perhaps Father was wrong. Perhaps it would have been better to leave this room in the dark. 

Father kneels. Kneels like a servant. It’s an odd sight, a frame large enough to contain its own kind of gravity curling in upon itself, hunching down until Father looks almost like a child, lost himself. He puts a hand on Damian’s shoulder, warm in a way the weak sunlight fails to be, and Damian stares. 

“You’re my son,” he says, so certain that Damian is almost convinced. “All I want you to be is the best Damian Wayne that you _can_ be.”

And Damian is used to objectives, to targets, to goals that can be accomplished (even if it will kill him to do so). But this...this is a task with no end. A task that will take a lifetime. It sounds impossible. He does not know what he is, or who he is, or how to be _good_ in the sense that Father seems to mean the word, but--

Father’s hand is on his shoulder, and Father’s warmth is seeping into his bruised muscles; and the sunlight that is beginning to flood the room is bright and beautiful, even if the room is not. (not yet).

He is going to fail this test, too, he knows it before he even begins; he is going to fail many times. But Father, he is beginning to realize, does not ask him to never fail. 

He asks him to try again. 


End file.
